The Klan has a long history. The dust and smoke of the civil war had hardly cleared in 1865 when a small group of white southerners on the defeated side met to form what would become one of the nastiest, most racist organisations in world history — the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

That first Klan flourished in the southern states in the late 1860s, but had almost died out by the early 1870s. It sought to overthrow the Republican state governments in the south during the Reconstruction Era, especially by using violence against African-American leaders and to bring back slavery.

Members made their own, often grotesque, colourful costumes, robes and masks designed to be terrifying and to hide their true identities.

The white sheets and conical hoods would come later. They were actually copied from D W Griffith’s 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation. The curious titles like “grand wizard” and such, also first saw light of day in that film script.

It triggered a second Klan flush in 1915 which flourished nationwide in the early and mid-1920s, particularly in urban areas of the midwest and west.

Rooted in local Protestant communities it opposed Catholics and Jews as well as black people at a time of high immigration from mostly Catholic nations of southern and eastern Europe. It also virulently opposed socialist and communist politics and the organised labour movement.

This second organisation adopted a standard white costume and used code words, which were similar to those used by the first Klan, while adding cross burnings and mass parades to intimidate others.

The third and current manifestation of the KKK emerged after WWII. It focused on opposition to the civil rights movement often using violence and murder to suppress activists.

Today, it is back in the headlines with its greatest fan in President Trump.

Last year, Klan membership nationwide was between 3,000 and 6,000 but, because of its long and colourful history, it punches well above its weight when it comes to media coverage.

Shrewd business decisions from early founders ensured that the Klan would always be on a firm financial footing.

In 1921, the second Klan adopted a modern business system of using full-time paid recruiters.

The national headquarters made its profit through a monopoly of costume sales, while the organisers were paid through initiation fees. Many national and local leaders became rich running their local Klan group rather like a franchised hamburger shop.

This second KKK preached “100 per cent Americanism” and demanded the purification of politics, calling for strict morality. Its official rhetoric focused on the threat of the Catholic Church.

It also demonstrated the right-wing attitudes that marked out their other politics. In major southern cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, Klan members kept control of access to the better-paying industrial jobs and opposed the labour unions.

During the ’30s and ’40s, Klan leaders urged members to disrupt the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO), which advocated industrial unions and accepted African-American members.

Using dynamite and skills from their jobs in mining and steel in the late 1940s some Klan members in Birmingham used bombings to destroy houses in order to intimidate upwardly mobile blacks from moving into middle-class neighbourhoods.

Internal divisions, criminal behaviour by leaders and external opposition brought about a collapse in Klan membership, which had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. It finally faded away in the ’40s.

In the ’50s and ’60s the Ku Klux Klan name was used by numerous independent local groups opposing the fast growing civil rights movement.

These Klan groupings often forged alliances with southern police departments as in Birmingham, Alabama, or with governor’s offices as with George Wallace of Alabama.

What I do care about is that they seemed to do it with the blessing of a man who claims to be the leader of the free world — President Trump.

When I first saw Trump winning his presidential candidature last year, I wrote in this paper that I began to understand how Hitler had made it to the top. Every day Trump sits in the Oval Office that comparison gets more and more terrifying.